BRYAN W. ALASPA

2018 ended and that's a good thing. Good riddance. A year which started bad, also ended bad. In between were a few (very few) highlights, but mostly it was a screaming nightmare punctuated by frantic depression and immense lows. Sure, I'm just speaking personally in this case. There were quite a few friends of mine who said they had one of their best years yet in 2018. Sadly, for me, it was a year of low output, the year I came closest to having total writer's block and then

My dad was born August 10, 1946. He was one of the infamous baby boomers. His dad was in the Army during World War II and guarded Japanese prisoners of war. My grandfather fell in love with my grandmother when they started writing to each other during the war. She had been writing to a high school friend and that friend played matchmaker and asked her to write to a “nice guy” who enjoyed listening to him reading her letters and wasn’t getting any of his own. When he got out o

Take a look at that photo there. Look at that guy who sort of looks like Gomez Addams there, right? That guy matches a voice that, in turn, matched a weird nighttime radio show that, for a brief and glorious time, dominated overnights in this country. That is Art Bell and for a time in the late 90s, he was there for me in ways others in my life were not. I had an obsession with radio for years. I got involved in it myself when the college I attended started a radio station. I